teen-oriented films and even television series such as
Buffy the Vampire Slayer(1997-2003), whose star, Sa-
rah Michelle Gellar, appeared inScream 2.
Impact The success ofScreamproved that the hor-
ror genre was indeed viable and led to its resurgence
through the remainder of the 1990’s and into the
twenty-first century.
Further Reading
Marriott, James, and Kim Newman.Horror: The Defin-
itive Guide to the Cinema of Fear.London: André
Deutsch, 2006.
Robb, Brian J.Screams and Nightmares: The Films of Wes
Craven.Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1998.
Charles Lewis Avinger, Jr.
See also Basic Instinct;Blair Witch Project, The; Cell
phones; Censorship; Film in the United States;
Friends; NC-17 rating;Silence of the Lambs, The.
Search engines
Definition Technology that enabled the
systematic retrieving of information from the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web contains billions of items of informa-
tion located on its millions of sites. With the development of
search engines in the 1990’s, Web users were able to locate
quickly the information they queried. Becoming indispens-
able to Web use, search engines contributed to the cachet and
soaring stock prices of Internet-related companies.
Various kinds of search engines retrieve data from
computers, but it was the emergence of efficient
Web search engines in the mid-1990’s that helped
make the resources of the Internet widely available.
The Internet is the worldwide network of inter-
connected computers. The Web is the collection of
billions of pages containing information in stan-
dardized interface that can be accessed on the Inter-The Nineties in America Search engines 759
Google founders Larry Page, left, and Sergey Brin at the Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View, California. Google had become the
dominant Internet search engine by the beginning of the twenty-first century.(AP/Wide World Photos)